IBM DB2 Database Updated For Big Data

Meanwhile, IBM also delivered an innovative advance in database technology that allows DB2 to process both row-based and column-based tables simultaneously within the same system. This allows much faster analysis of vast amounts of data for faster decision making.

Moreover, IBM provides integration with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Dynamic Cubes to provide breakthrough speed and simplicity for reporting and analytics. Companies can analyse key facts and freely explore more information faster from multiple angles and perspectives to make more informed decisions.

“The whole concept behind DB2 with BLU Acceleration is really quite fascinating,” Andrew Juarez, a lead database administrator at Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, said in a statement. “I really appreciate the approach of giving me all the benefits of a columnar database in harmony with a row-store within the same database.

“What IBM also has done that’s so special with BLU Acceleration is it enables us to deliver strong performance, even if the entire data set won’t fit into memory. That’s important because in a big data world, I might not be able to fit all of my data into memory, even with very high compression ratios. DB2 gives me a single solution for a vital business goal: deliver faster analytics to our users,” Juarez said.

BLU Breakthrough

Coca-Cola moved from the Oracle Database to DB2 in April 2008. “Before moving to DB2, our database was 950GB and sustained a 35GB-per-month growth rate,” he said. “Just by moving to DB2, the growth rate slowed to 15GB per month. Today our database is smaller than it was in 2008. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, BLU Acceleration came along.”

Iqbal Goralwalla, head of DB2 Managed Services at Triton Consulting of Norwich, UK, said, “I was quite anxious when I installed DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration on my Linux Intel server, which really does not have a large amount of RAM, nor does it have the latest processors. The results surprised me. My analytic workload ran 45 times faster. This is because with BLU Acceleration, not only can the data be larger than the amount of available RAM, but DB2 is also very effective at keeping the data in memory and was performing the data analytics directly on compressed data.”

IBM said the breakthrough speed and simplicity of BLU Acceleration is a complement to the existing transactional performance leadership of DB2 on Power System. DB2 takes advantage of Power System’s industry-leading multi-threading, cache size and memory bandwidth to deliver top speed and processing efficiency for both transactional and analytics workloads.

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Originally published on eWeek.